Free online access to property valuation records

The vast majority of council rating valuation data in New Zealand is controlled by Quotable Value Limited (QV) – a New Zealand State owned enterprise who does most the the valuation work for councils in NZ and charges for that service.

Essentially they have the monopoly on council valuation work in NZ. QV and their Australian joint venture company PropertyIQ Limited (a company owned by QV and RP Data), obviously want to maximise profits and so they also license the use of council data and resell it to banks, real estate agents and the like – if you go to their website, they’ll even resell your rating data back to you! (Remember you paid rates so that your council could pay for these valuations).

It does seem a bit bizarre that an Australian company to some degree controls access to New Zealand property data, but there you go.

The NZ Government has been promoting open access to government data, making it more available, allowing companies and individuals to add value and reinterpret the data – this is known as “Open Data”. Unfortunately to date it looks like the area of property data is outside this arrangement.

Some councils understand the value of providing their data in order to allow people like us to innovate, build cool tools, and provide useful or interesting information to ratepayers – including the Wellington City Council, who provided us with their District Valuation Record (all we had to do was pay for their time in extracting it). Big thumbs up to WCC!